Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear

Sipos, Thomas M. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 288 pp. Softcover. ISBN: 978-0786449729. $35.00.

Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear by Thomas M. Sipos is a practical guide to the generation of fear through various elements of cinematography and is intended for aspiring filmmakers and a general audience of horror movie fans. The book's tone is decidedly formalist: practical ingredients of film production are explored within a frame that is both universalizing and ahistorical and geared towards contemporary filmmakers working under budget restraints. The six main chapters (Chapters 3-8) focus on miseen-scène, framing, photographing, lighting, editing, and sound respectively. These chapters are, in turn, broken into subsections with cinematographic or thematic subheadings. In "Framing the Image" (Chapter 4), for example, one can find information about canted angles as well as low-budget framing; similarly, Chapter 8, "Putting Sound to the Image," contains a section on "Timbre" as well as one on "Low-budget Sound." These practical chapters are bookended by two uneven polemical chapters on "Defining the Genre" (Chapter 1) and "the Appeals of Horror" (Chapter 9), which set out to map the boundaries of the genre and its pleasures through confident declarative clauses and little recourse to the review of literature. Despite some interesting informal musings from Sipos, and a couple of important questions raised regarding horror's relation to science fiction and comedy, these chapters do not really serve as cohesive introductions to the genre or to multiple modes of genre analysis, even at an undergraduate level. The first chapter, "Defining the Genre," is followed by a 1.5-page chapter on "Pragmatic Aesthetics,"...